More history for the day

Alan Cowell and Rick Gladstone have an article in The New York Times about the latest in Iran:

In the latest sign of deteriorating relations with the West, around twenty Iranian protesters entered the British Embassy compound in Tehran, chanting “Death to England”, tearing down a British flag, and ransacking offices, news reports said. The episode came a day after Iran enacted legislation to downgrade relations with Britain in retaliation for intensified sanctions imposed by Western nations last week to punish the Iranians for their suspected nuclear development program. Britain promised to respond “robustly”.
The British Foreign Office in London said it was “aware of the reports” from Tehran, but declined to comment further. There was no immediate word on the whereabouts of the embassy staff, but an Iranian news agency said personnel had fled “by the back door”. The Associated Press identified the intruders as hard-line Iranian students, who were said to have burst into the building and thrown documents from windows. They also chanted: The embassy of Britain should be taken over.
The episode was shown live on Iranian state television. The invaders threw stones at windows, and one was seen climbing over the high wall around the compound with a looted portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. While some reports said the protesters clashed with riot police, other accounts said the authorities did nothing to prevent the attack.
While a small group of people entered the embassy, hundreds more gathered outside demanding the immediate departure of the British ambassador. Demonstrators waved flags symbolizing martyrdom, and held up portraits of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Reuters, adding that a second British compound in northern Tehran had also been attacked by demonstrators who seized what the state IRNA news agency called “classified documents”.
While Iranian riot police were reported to have stood by during the incursions, officers climbed the embassy gates to help protesters get back to the street, television pictures showed, according to Reuters. Then they began to slowly move the demonstrators away. It was not immediately clear if the episode was supposed to mirror the storming of the American embassy on 4 November 1979, that led to the continuing breach in diplomatic relations with Washington.
The moves against Britain’s diplomatic representation followed action by the Guardian Council, an Iranian clerical body that has oversight on bills passed by Parliament, which unanimously endorsed a bill to expel the ambassador and downgrade diplomatic contacts, Iranian news agencies reported. The council determined that the legislation was “not in violation of Islamic principles or articles of the Iranian constitution”, the Fars news agency quoted a council spokesman as saying.
The United States and the European Union imposed harsher sanctions on Iran on 21 November after the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency released a report on 8 November that said Iran might be working on a nuclear weapon and missile delivery system. Iran has denied those accusations and insists that its nuclear program is peaceful. It has called the United Nations report a false and shameful propaganda display done at the behest of the United States and its allies.
The sanctions imposed by Britain were considered the most severe because they required that all contacts with the Iranian Central Bank be severed, a step that other countries, including the United States, did not take. Iranian lawmakers had signaled last week that they would move quickly to downgrade diplomatic ties with Britain. The Foreign Office in London responded to the passage of the bill by calling the action “regrettable”.
William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, told British lawmakers that “if the Iranian government confirms its intention to act on this, we shall respond robustly in consultation with our international partners”, news agencies reported from London.
The Guardian Council’s speedy approval of the measure cleared the way for it to have the force of law and reflected Iran’s deepening anger over the sanctions. Under its terms, Britain’s ambassador, Dominick John Chilcott, must leave Tehran within two weeks, according to a report on the legislation by Press TV, a state-run English-language news site in Iran.
Iranian anger at the West was also evident in news reports that Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, had been forced to cancel a trip to The Hague (Rico's note: the city, not the British foreign secretary) because Hungary had refused permission for his aircraft to cross its airspace. It was not immediately clear why Hungary had taken such a step. Salehi is not on a list of Iranian officials who are banned from travel to the European Union under the current sanctions. Iran state television said the Hungarian ambassador had been asked for an explanation. Salehi had planned to attend a UN conference on the prohibition of chemical weapons.
Concern that Iran may be close to producing a nuclear weapon has grown since the release of the United Nations report, particularly in Israel, which considers Iran its most dangerous enemy. Iranian warnings to Israel against trying a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations have also escalated in recent weeks. The heightened sensitivities to the possibility of such a strike were apparent when a few Iranian news agencies reported on a suspected explosion near the central city of Isfahan, where the Iranians process uranium. The accounts of a blast being heard in the city were skimpy and contradictory, but that did not stop the Israeli news media from leading their evening broadcasts with the news. It was also the top item on the website of Haaretz, a major Israeli newspaper, with the headline: Explosion rocks Iran city of Isfahan, home to key nuclear facility.

Rico says this is going to get worse, not better, but making those thugs into martyrs might not be a bad idea...